


lonely, stuck in your mind

by bipolyjack



Series: Light It Up For Us [3]
Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: F/M, Mistakes, whats the opposite of hurt comfort bc thats what this is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-17
Updated: 2020-06-17
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:27:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24773869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bipolyjack/pseuds/bipolyjack
Summary: In the nearly five years since Addax joined the Rapid Evening, he has never discussed Jace with Jamil. With anyone. How could he?
Relationships: Addax Dawn/Jace Rethal, Addax Dawn/Jamil Quartz-Noble
Series: Light It Up For Us [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1310033
Kudos: 4





	lonely, stuck in your mind

“He must have thought you were dead,” says Jamil, in what strikes Addax as a calculatedly offhand tone, sipping her wine. “Before he dropped off the grid, I mean. Why didn’t you contact him?”

In the nearly five years since Addax joined the Rapid Evening, he has never discussed Jace with Jamil. With anyone. How could he? But the mission they ran today was grueling and now he’s tired and he has a few drinks in him and they’re doing something funny as they meet the painkillers already in his system and it’s warm in Jamil’s apartment and her couch is soft, and it’s dangerously easy for him to sink back into it the way he’s sinking into the memory, the one that plays behind his eyes every time he closes them, all this time later. The sea of Counterweight. The shattered cockpit, the puzzle-pieces of the Panther floating disparate, out of tandom. Jace’s arms outstretched, the golden orb. Peace - no, Order, a presence so overwhelming in his mind that there is no room for concern for Jace drifting, tiny amongst the wreckage of his mech. The blinding, consuming flash, the sea, gone, Weight, hanging huge above them, new, painfully beautiful. Counterweight, scorched cold. Jace, falling.

_I can stop war._

_I don’t believe you!_

Addax tips back the rest of his drink, which wasn’t really all that close to empty, and rests the glass on his leg, closing his eyes. “I was afraid,” he says simply.

“But you knew, right? You knew he was alive.”

“I didn’t. Not then.”

Jamil evidently doesn’t miss the strain in his tone. She slips out of her armchair to join him on the sofa, tucking her legs up under herself. He watches her hair cycle through its array of purples, none of which quite match his own, and swirls the slowly melting ice cubes in his otherwise empty glass. She holds her wineglass by the bulb, dangling the stem. “You cared for him, didn’t you.”

“Yes.” _And I thought I killed him._

“Addax,” she says softly, and he leans forward to set the remains of his drink down on the coffee table, a little too hard, glass clacking on glass.

“I really don’t want to talk about this.”

“It’s been five years -”

“Just - can you leave it?”

“I want to help you,” she says, with such compassion that a knot rises in Addax’s throat, maybe anger, maybe shame. “Let me help you.”

Addax doesn’t want to see that look on her face, so he pulls her to him and kisses her, more roughly than he means to at first, tangling a hand in her hair. She sighs against him, and in the sigh he can hear her thinking, _all right, yes, I can help this way, a little uncreative on your part, but alright_. And it’s been so long since he had a hand in someone’s hair, a mouth on his, a human heat pressing against him, that he responds like a starving man, bringing her onto his lap with hungry hands.

She fucks him with the same laser-minded attention with which she does all her other work - fast and skillful, every motion seeming to Addax, or at least to the part of his brain capable of processing anything in this moment, calculated to produce maximum effect. Addax makes a clumsy attempt at sliding a hand between her legs and she catches his wrist smoothly, pinning it behind his head. She does not come, shows no signs of even drawing anywhere near to coming, and yet by the time she climbs off of Addax he is spent and panting, sunk so far back into the couch cushions he fears he will never get up.

“I’m sorry,” he gasps out, and she stops in the doorway of her bedroom, turns to glance back at him.

“Yeah.”

He calls an air taxi and returns to his dark apartment, tired and drunk and ashamed.

**Author's Note:**

> Series and fic title from Son of Robot by Dance Gavin Dance.


End file.
